What is Cinema? Critical Approaches Revision and Exam Preparation

Exam rubric Answer TWO questions. All questions are equally weighted. Do not duplicate material between answers, or between exam and assessed coursework. In each answer you must refer to AT LEAST TWO of the critical approaches studied on the module.

Exercise Reformulate the following question (from a past paper) in your own words: ‘How effectively have theorists argued that cinema is a distinct art form?’

Some questions recurrently addressed by film theorists What is distinctive about cinema as an art form? What is the relationship between film and reality? What is the relationship between film and spectator? Other recurrent concerns: language, narrative, identity, pleasure/appeal/fascination

1. What is distinctive about cinema as an art form? Balázs: cinema has a distinctive capacity to change perspectives (angles and distances). ‘The whole of mankind is now busy relearning the long-forgotten language of gestures and facial expressions’ (The Visible Man).

Eisenstein: ‘Béla Forgets the Scissors’. ‘Cinema is, first and foremost, montage’ (‘Beyond the Shot’).

Metz and Wollen: used semiotics to explore cinema as a distinct artistic language

Manovich: ‘cinema can no longer be clearly distinguished from animation. It is no longer an indexical media technology but, rather, a subgenre of painting’ (The Language of New Media) Mulvey (2006): ‘the specificity of cinema, the relation between its material base and its poetics, dissolves while other relations, intertextual and cross-media, begin to emerge’ (‘Passing Time’)

2. What is the relationship between film and reality? Bazin: cinema should be judged ‘not according to what it adds to reality but to what it reveals of it’ (‘The Evolution of the Language of Cinema’; my emphases).

Kracauer: ‘Films come into their own when they record and reveal physical reality’ (Theory of Film).

Metz and Wollen: film does not simply reproduce or reveal reality but constructs it. Tobing Rony: film is historically entwined with colonialism in its industrial practices and aesthetics. Manovich and Mulvey (2006): digital technology means cinema’s specificity can no longer be grounded in indexicality.

3. What is the relationship between film and spectator? ‘In classical film theory two metaphors of the screen had vied for supremacy. André Bazin and the realists had championed the notion that the screen was a “window” on the world, implying abundant space and innumerable objects just outside its border. But to Eisenstein, Arnheim, and the formalists, the screen was a frame whose boundaries shaped the images appearing on it. The frame constructed meaning and effects; the window displayed them. […] Classical film theory could go no further. Only by shifting the discourse to another plane and invoking another system could modern theory develop. A new metaphor was advanced: the screen was termed a mirror’ (Dudley Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory (Oxford U. P., 1984), p. 134).

Baudry, Metz and Mulvey (1975): use the tools of psychoanalysis to explore how cinema dramatises psychic processes, including the ‘mirror stage’ described by Lacan.

Mulvey (1975): highlights the gendered dynamics of the gaze

Stam and Spence: dominant cinema privileges a Western view point (the gaze is raced and implicated in colonial history), which is countered by ‘Third cinema’ and postcolonial cinemas.

Sobchack and Silverman: film significantly affects the spectator’s body (touch, hearing) Butler: identities and identifications are not fixed but fluid and mobile. Aaron: cinema’s pleasures and unpleasures are not neutral and innocent but ethically charged and shaped by technological change.

Bordwell: cognitivist theorists are concerned with the conventions that explain how viewers routinely, consciously and actively make sense of films by processing audio-visual cues.

Mulvey (2006) and Casetti: contemporary spectatorship is increasingly interactive.